Homemade Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream and Cones

I have to admit that of all the sweet treats available in this world, ice cream is kind of at the bottom of my list of favorites...

I know.  Everyone else is madly in love with ice cream. Everyone everywhere.  It's like the universal sweet treat.

But, not for me.  I'm more of a cake/cookies/pie/brownies kinda guy.  For me, ice cream has just always been ok.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with it--it tastes great and all that but if I'm going to have it I'd rather it be alongside a piece of cake or hot apple pie or on top of a brownie smothered in hot fudge.

Alone, or just in a cone, never really made my mouth water.

The funny thing is that I own an ice cream maker.  I personally asked for it for Christmas one year.  And I even use it from time to time.  But I like making ice cream more for the novelty and fun of just the process that is involved. And then just the fact that I can say, "Hey look!  I just made ice cream!"

It's not because I love ice cream. I've never really loved it and didn't think I ever would.

But, I was wrong.  I was crazy wrong.  And it's all due to one flavor, one magnificent salted caramel butter flavored ice cream.

This ice cream is so caramely and sweet and it has these little bits of caramel praline embedded throughout that turn into a gooey caramel surprise that beautifully contrasts the smooth creamy caramel mixture.  

It's just a giant caramel overload.  

But not like a bad overload.  

No. A wonderful heavenly overload. What's more, I just may have kindled a new found love for ice cream...

Many thanks to my partner Andres for holding the
cone in various locations of our apartment while I fussed
over the best lighting.

A couple of things:  

I used David Lebovitz's Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream recipe which can be found here.  It's very detailed and he has great pictures.  

For the cones I used his recipe as well which is here.  They were extremely easy to make as far as working with the batter.  Once you have the batter made, you spread it out on a piece of parchment paper with an offset spatula (this is all assuming you don't have an ice cream cone waffle maker) into a 6" circle.  I think that next time I would draw a circle of the back of the parchment paper as an easy guide.   

As far as rolling them out into their cone shape I didn't have an ice cream cone roller so I went to Michaels and bought a couple options--a styrofoam and a paper cone. I opted for the paper cone and just wrapped it in aluminum foil.  It worked well.  But the whole rolling process has to go fast because the minute you take them off the hot baking sheet you have to roll them before they stiffen up.  The problem is that they are also really hot so I had to use a tea towel to roll them.  Most of the time it worked fine but I could never pinch the bottom of the cone to close off the hole completely.  So...I ended up melting some chocolate and pouring about a tablespoon into the bottom of each cone to close off the hole--which worked great.  And I love chocolate so I had no problem with this solution...

All in all the cones are very easy to make and kinda fun too.  Oh, and as you can see I dipped the rims in chocolate as well and then half of them in crushed peanuts and the other half in mini chocolate chips.